When I was about three or four years old I was walking down the stairs in my childhood home wrapped in a towel, fresh out of the bath, and looking for my mother so she could brush out my thick mop of blonde hair. I was about at the last step, wobbling uncoordinatedly on my stubby toddler legs, when I stepped on the edge of the towel and propelled myself directly forward with great force onto the unyielding tile floor, breaking the fall with my chin. I screamed bloody murder and my parents came running and hollering into the hall where I was bleeding profusely and wailing for their help. The only thing I remembered about it after that was being strapped onto an examination table in a straight jacket like device by my pediatrician, head and all, so I couldn’t shake around, and then given a couple stitches. The next week I came back and got them taken out, which was much less of a dramatic experience. I still have the scar on my chin, which is what I started thinking about while I watched a pudgy, disgruntled looking nurse stitch up the large gash in my right knee.
I was sitting in a curtained off bed at the Wautaga hospital in Boone, and based on what I could hear coming from the nurses station outside the curtain, my friend Sawyer was in a bed nearby. I had gotten there probably a half hour before Sawyer did, and the nurses were saying something about him having Xanax in his system, which I knew couldn’t be right—he would’ve said something, would’ve told my boyfriend at the very least. My train of thought was interrupted by my ex girlfriend Kristen, who was sent to keep me company and update me on what was going on back at my apartment via my roommate.
“It’s like they’re fighting over you like a piece of meat,” she said in a taunting voice. She hadn’t been at the apartment with us when the accident that landed Sawyer and me in the hospital had happened. And I was on LSD, so I didn’t take her too seriously. I shrugged it off and tried to focus on the bright red slice above my knee that was doused in chlorhexidine and slowly being closed up by sutures.
I was straining to hear the nurses outside the curtain over the rest of the hidden commotion. I was trying to listen for information about Sawyer, but instead I could only hear the bustle of the hospital and him singing in a slurred, heavy voice the lyrics of some song I didn’t recognize. He seemed pretty out of it—I needed to see him. I briefly heard a nurse say to someone that they gave him something to make him come down from the acid so he could give a statement to the police. Before I could catch what the drug was the nurse stitching my leg up announced condemningly how lucky I was that I didn’t have very serious or permanent injuries, any deeper or lower on my leg and I could’ve been walking with a limp for the rest of my life—or bleeding out in my closet before the police could even get there to call the ambulance. I ignored that too. I was more distracted by Sawyer’s voice.
I knew things were bad, but I didn’t really know how bad. I thought back to my memory of the apartment right after I had gotten hurt. Sawyer was flailing around belligerently in my walk in closet, knocking all my roommate’s clothes on top of himself. I watched dumbstruck from the couch in the living room. Sawyer was naked from the waste down and seemed to have considerable trouble manipulating his motor functions. After hiding all the drugs and getting a towel for my sliced open leg, my roommate joined me on the couch and watched in wide eyed horror when my boyfriend Milo opened the closet to find Sawyer jacking off, as if nothing had happened. Milo was fuming. He yelled at Sawyer in vain, demanding to know what the fuck he was thinking, asking how he could hurt me like that, and so on. Sawyer just said “fuck all that man,” and kept jacking off. Milo shook his head and resignedly closed the door. He joined us in the living room and we all tried to guess what would happen next, until the residential director showed up. We tried to convince her that everything was fine, that it was just an accident–which was true. But the second she saw my leg she called the police. Five officers showed up within minutes.
The living room suddenly became very crowded, and reality began to rejoin my assessment of the gravity of the situation. I knew he was going to get kicked out of school, and that even though I was a straight A student with a near perfect GPA, I probably would too. But all that was too much to think about, and the police began asking me questions. They asked if he still had the knife he used to slice open my leg. I nodded over to the bloody pocket knife my roommate had retrieved from the closet and put on the kitchen counter. Several of them went into my bedroom to inspect the situation in the closet. Another one collected the knife in an evidence bag.
A few minutes later an EMS team arrived and helped me get onto a stretcher. My eyes stayed locked on Sawyer in the open closet, who was now being wrestled out of the pile of clothes he had buried himself in. In the ambulance a fat nurse with blue hair took three or four tries at putting an IV needle in my arm. I realized that hurt more than actually getting stabbed.
I found out later that the officers had to hunt through the pile of clothes to find his pants and the rest of his personal items. That’s why he took so long getting to the hospital. Shortly before the nurse finished my sutures, which totaled up to three internal and nineteen external, an officer joined us in the sterile, curtained-off room. It was the second time he had come in there, and the first time he was only there to try to convince me to press charges. The second time he matter of factly informed Kristen that I was going to go with him back to the campus police station and give a statement before I would be released. Not needing to be told twice Kristen gathered her things, handed me the drawstring bag Milo packed for me, and sauntered out of the room.
After my leg got bandaged up I was given crutches, instructed doggedly not to bend my knee or get the sutures wet, and asked to come back in seven to ten days for their removal. I hobbled out of the curtained area behind the officer. The entire time I had been getting stitched up I could hear Sawyer harassing the police and the nurses with his unnaturally dark humor and careless grip on the whole scenario. The cocktail of drugs he was on certainly didn’t help. I walked by the nurses station and into the lobby, seeing him for the first time since being wheeled out of my apartment. He stopped his antics for a moment, squinting his eyes at me in vague recognition. He said my name in slow motion with a wavering uncertainty, like someone seeing a person they knew years prior and not wanting to call them the wrong name.
The implied question mark at the end of my name made me wonder if he had any memory at all of the night, or of what he had done. Stepping out into the bitterly cold January air felt incredibly freeing after being forced to sit still in a sterile room for over an hour fighting off the introspective alertness produced by the acid. The drive back to campus seemed unusually long, but I let my leftover high rock me in and out of listless conversation with the officer. All I wanted to talk about or think about was Sawyer. I looked at the time and it was getting close to five in the morning. My head suddenly felt heavy as we arrived at the police station. Once again I stepped into the cold air, letting out a deep sigh I didn’t realize I was holding in while watching the cloud from my breath dissipate. The officer handed me my crutches from the back seat. After I got my footing I paused for a moment to appreciate that I was alive, and that the worst I would have to deal with physically was scar tissue pains. Then I reluctantly followed the officer inside.
While weaving through the tight halls of the App State police station on my crutches I thought back over the past twelve hours. I don’t know what possessed us to do so, but my boyfriend and I decided to drive to Charlotte to get some tabs of acid from this girl I met through my ex. We had been talking about it for a couple days, and that Friday was the last day of the first week of the spring semester, so it seemed only fair that we embark on a celebratory psychedelic voyage..
We left around four after our last class. The whole way there I was itching with the anxious, anticipatory excitement you get before taking a psychedelic. After two hours on the interstate I pulled off onto an unassuming exit and turned into a quiet subdivision that looked like every other neighborhood built in the late eighties. I pulled up in front of the house matching the address she sent us and waited. After a moment Milo asked if we should knock on the door, but earlier in the day she told me not to come to the door because her boyfriend, the acid supplier, was “weird about people.” Not knowing exactly what that meant I was happy to stay in the car. Before too long she came bouncing down the brick porch stairs and slid fluidly into the back seat while lighting a cigarette. She handed Milo a small piece of tin foil with six tabs of acid wrapped in it and instructed us to go to the Subway around the corner. Milo and I had to pee but she didn’t want us to go inside and upset her partner, so Subway was our closest option.
On the way there we all caught up a bit. Last time she saw me was my first time doing acid. She acted as a shaman of sorts, guiding me through the vast and vivid mental landscape that overwhelmingly bloomed like fractals in my mind. Milo had been there too, but this was back when we were just friends. She was surprised to find out that we were now dating and warned us about getting too involved with each other’s psyche during the trip: “Sometimes it can be weird when you trip with a romantic partner; you can get really wrapped up in each other and lose sight of your own journey throughout the experience.” Milo and I looked at each other doubtfully and smiled. We all went in and used the bathroom, then dropped her off before heading back up the mountain to Boone.
The whole drive played out rapidly in my head when the officer asked where the acid had come from. I curtly answered “Charlotte,” and waited for the next question as he scribbled my answer on his notepad. My mind trailed off to picking up Sawyer earlier that evening. There was a small parking lot in between the dorms Milo and Sawyer lived in, Lovill and Cannon. I parked in a spot in front of Lovill to wait for Sawyer; Milo went up to his room to get a change of clothes and his weed. I jumped when Sawyer opened the back door and plopped into my car. His beanie was pulled up nearly all the way to his freshly cut hairline, and he was wearing a thick, white, cable-knit sweater, and all black Adidas Tiro pants. He always looked so tidy.
I was always secretly attracted to Sawyer, but I didn’t think I was his type. And I had started dating Milo, my friend of nearly seven years, only a month prior. Just as Sawyer started to ask how the drive was, Milo got in the front seat wearing a cow onesie. We all laughed hysterically. I asked what the hell he was thinking, and he claimed that he was wearing it so that he wouldn’t get paranoid about people staring at him.
“If they see me in this and stare at me I’ll think they’re just staring because I’m a cow, not because I’m on acid.” I shook my head, thinking that was the dumbest idea on the planet, and backed out of the parking lot.
It was around 8:30 when we got back to my apartment, which is what I told the cop, followed by what time we took the acid, which was around 8:45. What I didn’t mention was the fight Milo and I got in right after we had all passed my bong around and ceremoniously put a tab each under our tongues. I was just getting settled into the warmth of my high when Milo announced that he left his cigarettes in my car and needed my keys to retrieve them. I told him the keys were on my desk, which is where I always put them when I got home.
After looking on and around my desk for the keys and not seeing them Milo got frustrated. The lack of nicotine itching at his brain combined with his frustration at me turned into taunting. His tone turned sour and condescending, saying “I can’t believe you’d lose something like that so quickly; what are you, retarded?” My cheeks burned with rage and pain pricked the back of my throat as I choked back indignant tears. I was also still annoyed at his decision to dress like a fucking cow. I wrenched open my desk drawer, got the spare key for my car, and practically threw it at him. Sawyer chuckled darkly. I cut my eyes over at him and barked “What’s so fucking funny?”
“You take everything too seriously,” he said back, mocking me with his devilish eyes. My frustration only grew, so I went to the kitchen to take some deep breaths and steady myself. I knew the acid would be kicking in soon and I didn’t want my trip to be tainted with the hurt of their hazing.
These kinds of interactions weren’t uncommon, and Sawyer was a frequent actor in our accusatory banter. Oftentimes he would provoke further arguments, or randomly take one of our sides in an arbitrary matter just to rile the other of us up. Standing there peering at myself in the soapy dish water I thought about how things had changed between all of us since Milo and I started dating. I remembered the warning to not get too wrapped up into Milo while I trip, and quickly made a pact with myself not to let anything bother me. A light psychedelic comfort started blooming in my abdomen as Milo reentered the apartment trailed by a gust of icy air and the odor of cigarette smoke.
We joined Sawyer in the bathroom where he was packing up another bowl and dancing to himself. At this point we all decided to take our second tab. Sawyer said he didn’t feel anything and suggested we watch some trippy music videos to get the visuals going. The three of us piled onto my twin XL bed and huddled around my laptop. After a few videos with purposefully psychedelic imagery Sawyer suggested we smoke some more.
We all got situated in my closet and started passing the bong around. Before too long that blossoming psychedelic warmth turned into a limbic tidal wave of loopy sensation, then a tsunami, then an atomic shockwave through every neuron in my body. The feeling ushered me into a familiarly colorful and noisy mental landscape—a tie-dye blend of visual acuity and vertigo, all boundaries of thought and feeling dissolving into a gentle, purple tinted haze. My apprehensions faded into the humorous disorientation of the acid, which was beginning to take effect on Milo and Sawyer as well. The three of us were sitting on the floor of my compact closet, configured in such a way that mine and Sawyer’s legs were parallel, and Milo was scrunched up in the corner across from Sawyer with his knees pulled up to his chest. I wasn’t thinking much of it–or of anything–until Sawyer repeatedly brought up how weird it was that our legs were touching. He kept suggesting that he and Milo switch places, so they did.
Suddenly the officer across from me began speaking again. This next prompt was more general and difficult to answer. He asked me to describe the sequence of events leading up to Sawyer assaulting me. Around this time I heard Sawyer, who had just arrived from the hospital, talking to another officer. Their voices echoed off of the green and white tiles of the floors. I strained to hear, forgetting to acknowledge the officer’s questions.
He asked me again, so I thought for a moment. I didn’t want to incriminate Sawyer, or myself for that matter, but there was no way to circumnavigate what had happened. He really could’ve killed me, accident or not. The luridly astounding reality of my location started to settle in. I had never been in a police station before, let alone because I was the “victim” of a “violent crime.” My mom still didn’t know for fuck’s sake. I blankly looked up from the floor and glanced around at the piles of paper and folders stacked around the room. Everything was manilla.
I tried to think back to the part of the night when things went sideways, replaying our closet smoke sesh in my mind—when the drugs really started to take hold of us. Sawyer seemed agitated then. We were all smoking, and all smoked regularly so our tolerance was high. But after the third round of bong passes, right after he had already smoked, Sawyer said “I honestly don’t even feel that high,” and went for another rip. Milo was looking at me with the tell tale look of sexual arousal. Sawyer exhaled a cloud of smoke into the silence that had crept up between us all, then started putting his shoes on. He said he was going for a walk in the hall.
Milo and I started kissing sloppily the moment he left. We turned off the light and it was pitch black. The intensity of the visuals only increased in the darkness, and our attempt at love making became a comedic and unintentional wrestling match. Neither of us could coordinate our bodily functions and eventually just ended up laying side by side on the floor, experiencing our own fantastical kaleidoscopes of color—until I remembered that Sawyer was still wandering the halls of my building alone. I shot up from the floor, suddenly much less vertically impaired, and opened the door, blinding us both with the light of my room, and said we should go look for him. We set out towards the basement and vending machines because that was pretty much the only place to go. I lived in Appalachian Heights, an impersonal, suite style dorm that was anything but homey, especially under the influence of LSD. We made the trek across the building and down two flights of stairs, turned the corner into the snack room and there was Sawyer trying to get a soda. We all made eye contact and for a moment the psychedelic paranoia of being caught by a stranger flashed in his eyes, but then Sawyer recognized us and cracked up in relief. All very deep in the sludge now we cackled all the way to my room.
My roommate was still on FaceTime and I didn’t want to bother her, so I suggested we hang out in the living room. This is where things became irreparably strange, I think. Sawyer was sitting on the couch, feet on the coffee table, knocking his knees together aimlessly; Milo was enamored with thin air and had the mental acuity of a sea slug. Sawyer kept looking at me, scanning me up and down. I was wearing a pair of men’s boxers, a Seattle tee-shirt, and a very oversized vintage jacket that my dad gave me
Sitting in front of the officer I thought about the fact that I was wearing different pants at the moment because Sawyer had cut my boxers off in the process of slicing my leg open. He asked me what I had been wearing during the time of the assault, and I answered honestly. The officer rapidly scribbled information down and then looked up at me.
“So, you were wearing your underwear in the hallway?” The question perturbed me. For the first time since walking into the room I had the thought that this man wasn’t on anyone's side. He wasn’t trying to help me or get answers, he was just doing his due diligence and inadvertently making a teenager feel like complete shit for a total accident.
I could still hear fragments of Sawyer’s statement he was giving a few rooms down, sounding much more sober than he was at the hospital. He said, “I don’t really know what happened. We were all just hanging out and having a good time, and then I remember waking up in the hospital.” I wondered if that was true, the fact that he didn’t remember anything.
I remembered everything extremely vividly. Sawyer was talking about how slow the time was passing. Then we all would talk for a bit, which would seem like an eternity, and then Sawyer would interrupt the conversation and remind us that only a minute had passed. Five minutes felt like five years. I started getting antsy, realizing that we still had about eight hours until the acid would wear off. It was around 11:30 when I suggested that Milo and I go take a shower and clear our heads a bit. Sawyer snickered and said in a low voice he was going to go jack off in my closet. I shook my head and started getting up, nudging Milo on the shoulder.
Milo was on a different plane of existence, paying no attention to Sawyer. I walked towards the bedroom, pausing by the door to wait for Milo. As Sawyer passed by me he slid his hand up my thigh and in between my legs. I looked up at him dumbfounded and a little embarrassed but he suddenly slinked into my closet and pulled the door shut. Milo hadn’t seen anything, but he suddenly regained some amount of communicatory abilities and said he wanted to call his friend before we showered. I honestly needed a second to collect myself, so I encouraged him to take the call in the living room.
For a moment, I stood blankly in front of the closet. I took a big breath in and held it as I looked at the handle of the door. I let the breath out and decided to just confront him directly about what he had just done. I admittedly was attracted to him, but he was one of Milo’s best friends. I opened the door planning to ask him what the hell he was thinking. But as soon as he saw the door opening he flung his hands over his exposed genitals and clapped his legs together in shock. He was completely naked from the waist down. Hardly able to believe my eyes, I yanked the door shut.
Confused and extremely shocked, I decided the only thing I could do was to go in there and talk to him. I opened the door hesitantly, and he looked up at me, not trying to conceal himself at all this time. Instead he sloppily tried to pick weed out of the shag rug and put it in the bowl. He had knocked a full grinder over the first time I opened the door and was too far gone to realize he shouldn’t smoke anymore. He could barely control his arms.
I tried to draw his attention away, joking with him about spilling the weed. I was notorious for knocking over bowls and breaking bongs, so I thought making a joke about it would snap him back into reality a bit. Instead he just extended both of his arms limply towards me and mumbled something. I took a step closer, thinking he maybe just needed help getting up and getting sorted. I was bending down to try and pull him up by his arms when he said “come here.” I leaned in closer to him. He moved his face rapidly closer to mine and started closing his eyes like he was trying to kiss me, so I stood up and tried to back away.
It all happened so fast, but it looked like it was in slow motion. I fumbled for the door handle and wrenched it open as he was grabbing my waistband with one hand and slicing through the fabric of my boxers with the knife in his other hand. The knife slid through my skin like butter. The sound of the ripping cloth was instantly juxtaposed with the gentle hiss of skin being cut. I fell out of the open door but somehow remained on my feet. I remember shouting for him to stop because it was all I could think to say, which is what caught Milo’s attention. He came bursting into the room with a look of horror on his face. He thought it was much worse than it was–it did look worse than it was.
I looked at him, looked at my roommate, who was horrified, and then looked down at my leg. There was a slice about five inches long and two inches wide on the front right side of my knee. From what the nurses said it was pretty deep, too. I was the most composed one in the room so I told them to hide everything illegal and to get something for my leg. I hobbled over to the couch and sat down. Milo opened the closet; Sawyer was slummpy and out of it. My roommate and Milo grabbed what they could drug wise from around the room and stashed it in a drawstring bag that they hid under my bed. My roommate also somehow got the knife out of the closet and put it on the kitchen counter.
I pretty much recounted all of that information to the officer–minus the drug bits. It obviously reeked of weed in the apartment when all the cops showed up, but no one seemed to care about that. After all the questioning at the station the officer asked me again if I wanted to press charges. I declined and asked when I could go home. He suggested I stay somewhere else for a day or two to let myself recover and not have to be in the same space as the accident. Around this time is when Milo showed up at the police station with his mother. She drove up from Hendersonville and offered to get us set up in a hotel.
The rest of the night was weird. Milo’s mom took us to my apartment so we could get some clothes and all of our weed shit, then drove us to the hotel across town. We smoked in the car, told her a brief version of what had happened, and then went inside to check in. Finally alone with Milo in the soft darkness of the hotel room, I sat on the edge of the bed and cried. I still hadn’t called my mom. In the morning when I finally did call her I was sitting in the same spot on the bed. However, I was unable to sit still during the call and immediately got up and started hobbling around the room. I walked into the bathroom and sat on the edge of the tub and stared at myself in the mirror while my mom berated me about not calling her sooner, saying she would’ve gotten me a plastic surgeon, that I’m lucky to be alive, and so on.
Reluctantly, I glanced down at my legs. My right leg was fully extended and still bandaged up. I hadn’t really fully looked at it, but I knew there was going to be a sizable scar under the bandage. It’s shrunken and changed over the years–you’d need calculus to really measure it now. I looked up at the mirror again and realized I had started crying again. I tried to shut it down before I started talking, but my voice shook as I told my mom that a plastic surgeon was the last thought on my mind. I understand now why that was something she was thinking about. At the time, though, I just wanted to be comforted instead of lectured. I knew she was upset about the drugs, and the potential of me getting kicked out of college, but so was I.
I found out later from my roommate that while the cops were searching the room, trying to find Sawyer’s pants and underwear, they found my keys in some hidden, inner jacket pocket of Sawyer’s overcoat. Finding that out was a shock–like he knew what he was doing the whole time. I started thinking he took my keys and hid them on purpose to cause Milo and me to get into it. Even though we’d only been together for a month or so, anyone who was around us on a regular basis witnessed us go at it over the smallest things. It seemed too absurd to assume that Sawyer would be so maniacally observant and able to create such an orchestrated disagreement between Milo and me.
The following Monday I received a notice from the conduct office with a date and a time to come in and explain the situation because it happened on campus property. Milo received the same letter. Sawyer got expelled and arrested that night for misdemeanor assault with a deadly weapon, and was later released to his father. Milo and I both got put on disciplinary probation, which meant we had to take regular drug tests. This wasn’t something either one of us were prepared to do. We tried our damndest to quit, but sleep was harder and harder to come by, and the only time I felt really comfortable was in the early morning hours before anyone was up. I would sneak to Milo’s car and get high by myself in the dark and think about Sawyer. The last time I saw him we were all in the hallway of the police station still. He poked his head out of the door of the room he was being interrogated in. He looked very sober, like the hospital had purged the drugs and his memories out of him with whatever they gave him. I tried to show him with my eyes that I wasn’t mad at him, but the officer in the room yelled at him to sit back down. He reluctantly slunk back into the room, and Milo pulled me away from the door.
